Clark Diaries

16th Nov, 2008

Financial crisis forum and a visit to a quilt store

The financial crisis has been one of the most critical issues these days, many people are worried about the economy, and there are various opinions about causes and solutions of the crisis. I went to a forum about the fianancial crisis organized by International Studies Stream on Monday night. There were three speakers, Professor Robert Pollin from UMass-Amherst, who is the founding Co-director of the Political Economy Research Institue (PERI), Professor Michael Stone from UMass-Boston, whose research centers on community planning, and Professor Richard Peet from Clark who apart from being one of the most popular geography professors at Clark, researches topics about globalization, development, political ecology, social theory and the philosophy of science. Professor Peet talked about “Inequality, Elites and the Causes of Financial Crisis”. He approached the causes of the financial crisis from a different perspective rather than focusing on the bubbles in the real estate field. He thinks the crisis is occuring because the rich people get a too big portion of total income, and thus, the solution is to tax the rich people. His speech was really inspring, and it also presented a different perspective for me to see the crisis macroscopically. Then, Professor Stone went back to the essential of the housing market, that he described as a house of cards. He traced back to a book he wrote in the 1980s that analyzed the housing system and forecasted the crash. Finally, Professor Pollin gave some specific suggestions on what has to be done to solve the crisis and recession. To name a few, having Federal Reserve bail out, ways of subsidizing and restructuring bad mortgages, and stimulating the economy through creating jobs. These three professors provided students various and deep analyses of the financial crisis, which helped us to understand the situation better. I found it very helpful and I enjoyed the lectures.

I went to my mentor’s cousin’s, Linda, house for lunch on Saturday. Linda adopted a girl from China whose name is Hanna, and this year, they have an exchange student Yuki from Bejing living with them too. Yuki is a high school senior and interested in applying Clark. They went to the infomation session organized by the Admissions office on Saturday morning, and I showed them around the campus after that. We had Chinese fried noodles for lunch whcih were very delicious. Then, Linda took us to a quilt store in the afternoon. She makes good quilts and has her own sewing workshop. Unfortunately, the quilt store is closing next week, but on the other hand, everything was 50 percent off. There were all kinds of colorful cloth, quilt designs, and working equipment. Linda got all the materials to make Christmas presents and even Yuki got a cute mini Kimona set which only needs to be folded to make it. I had great fun in the shop taking pictures and exploring the things that were sold there.